4 out of 5

Label: Merge

Producer: Spoon

Yeah, Spoon was one of the bands in my collection that bit the dust when I decided I was too cool for everything.  The reasons vary – that Merge was too much of a hipster label at the time, that cute chicks like/d Spoon (that chick-obsessed me flags albums that cute chicks like is indicative of SOME kind of gender issues… right?  MOM?  RIGHT?), that ‘Girls’, with its incessant beat and smooth keys, leans more toward pop than rock…

But I was an idiot.  We know that.  ‘Cause this albums rocks hard.  Yeah, the beats are slick and those keys do doll it up, but its all in the name of punctuating some great love and fuck-love songs, Britt Daniel’s pouty vocals the perfect huff for slingin’ smartly penned lines that are straight-forward enough to make point but mature enough to not be cloying or preachy.  And when the more angular tracks pucker through the pop shimmer – like ‘Believing Is Art’s harsh guitar lick that pops up for the chorus – man, it’s all you can do to not just close your eyes and bob your head and sway your hips, regardless of being in church at your mother’s funeral (MOOOOOMMMM).  Yes, it dips into some cutesy Beatles-y stuff with 10:20 Am, but it matches the hooky vibe of the album, and it only lasts long enough to coast you to the next rocker.  One thing the album lacks, though, is a sense of cohesion.  These tracks belong together, for sure, but there’s something jumbled about the arrangement here, the flow between songs not really working in the latter half of the album.

That’s minor, though, right?  A whole album of songs this sick and catchy is a rare gem.  Shame on me for tossing it to the curb those many-ish years ago.  But we gotta’ learn somehow.